When a (Partial) Tweet Becomes an Ad, What Are the Rules?

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

January 6, 2014

The media world gets weirder every day, but this moment still stands out as something of a stunner – the kind of thing that merits a place on the eternal timeline of “How the Internet Flipped the Media World on Its Head.”

Picture it:

Tony Scott – known as A. O. Scott to those who read his film criticism in The Times – is at home on Saturday morning. He picks up his print edition of The Times, planning to do the crossword puzzle. But first he leafs through the paper, and there on Page C7 is a full-page advertisement – almost all white space except for 75 characters. It’s his tweet from a few days before. Actually, no, it’s not his full tweet, but a part of his tweet, mocked up to look like a full tweet. (At the bottom of the page is a reference to Mr. Scott’s list of best pictures of the year, which puts “Inside Llewyn Davis” in the No. 1 spot.)

He was surprised, although this wasn’t the first he had heard of his tweet about “Inside Llewyn Davis” being used as ad fodder. Just a few days before, he had heard from the movie’s publicist, Cynthia Swartz, who nicely asked permission to use a shortened version of the tweet.

One of the film’s producers, Scott Rudin, had seen the tweet, she said, and wanted to use it in an ad, but to avoid appearing to criticize competitors – in accordance with the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – proposed shortening or changing it. The original tweet read as follows:

You all keep fighting about Wolf of Wall St. and Am Hustle. I’m gonna listen to the Llewyn Davis album again. Fare thee well, my honeys.

Well this is a new one. I’d prefer though that my tweets not be used in advertisements. That seems like a slippery slope and contrary to the ad hoc and informal nature of the medium.

And changing the tweet is basically manufacturing a quote, something I avoid.

So I’m afraid the answer is no.

However, those placing the ad apparently interpreted a pretty clear “no,” as a cheery “certainly, go right ahead!”

And thus, without further discussion, the ad appeared.

“I’m surprised that Rudin did it over my objection, and I do feel that The Times itself should have checked with me, especially given that these are my words but not from a review,” Mr. Scott told me on Monday. “This is new enough ground that it should have been talked about more.”

The Times’s executive vice president for advertising, Meredith Kopit Levien, was not available for comment. So I called Eileen Murphy, The Times’s spokeswoman, who told me that the newspaper’s advertising staff members were not aware of Mr. Scott’s objections and would have handled it differently had they known.

When I reached Ms. Swartz by phone on Monday, and asked her what happened, she quickly ended the call, promising that she – or someone from CBS Films – would call me back. Mr. Rudin called shortly thereafter to say that he saw no problem whatsoever, that he has frequently used tweets before in ads for movies or plays, and that he recognizes no distinction between what a critic writes in a review or on Twitter. He also noted that Mr. Scott later told Ms. Swartz in an email that he found the ad “very clever.”

“If a critic is going to tweet it, we’re free to use it,” he said. “We’re free to edit any review. We pull out what we want.”

What’s more, Mr. Rudin said, The Times approved the ad. “The paper running the ad is a tacit approval of the content of the ad,” he said.

He disagreed with my suggestion that there is a well-recognized wall between the newsroom and the advertising department. “They took our money and they ran the ad,” he said. The cost, according to Mr. Rudin and confirmed by Ms. Murphy, was about $70,000.

He said the depiction of the tweet could and probably should have reflected that it was partial and not complete, possibly through the use of “MT,” which means modified tweet. “We weren’t trying to pass it off as something it wasn’t,” Mr. Rudin said.

There are about 25 intriguing issues in this situation, some of which have already been explored in Slate, Atlantic Wire, and – naturally – on Twitter:

it appears that using @aoscott’s tweet in a print ad without his consent is against Twitter’s ToS: https://t.co/2TSmnfLtmq

* The Times encourages its writers to be active in social media. This, at least in part, benefits The Times as a business entity as opposed to The Times as a journalistic beacon. Brand-building and all of that. So shouldn’t there at least be some conversation between advertising and the newsroom about boundaries and practices?

* Digital platforms and social media rule the media world, right? But when the target audience is Oscar voters – as well as movie ticket buyers – the best way to make sure they pay particular attention to something on Twitter may be to put it in a print ad.

* Journalists who are active on Twitter have to be hyper-aware that what they write may be used in ways they never imagined. It’s all too easy to think you’re in a conversation involving a few, or even a few hundred, people. In fact, it’s the entire wired universe, or – if it’s used in a printed newspaper – even the non-wired universe.

As Daniel J. Wakin, a deputy editor for the Culture section, told me Monday, what happened here is “a bizarre extension but not an illogical extension” of the use of partial (and usually glowingly exclamatory) quotations from film reviews in movie ads. He added that “If I were the writer, I would have some problems with it.”

* The Culture editor, Danielle Mattoon, said that she was surprised that Mr. Scott’s Twitter commentary about the movie’s soundtrack, rather than the movie itself, would have been used as the basis of such a prominent ad. That it was, though, speaks to the relentless and inventive marketing of both the film and its music; there has been a great deal of crossover and much interweaving, as an article a few days ago by Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario made clear. (Ms. Mattoon also said that “it would have been nice to have a heads-up” from the advertising department so that there could have been some discussion about the ad. She added that she hopes some discussion about practices will follow soon.)

* This is not native advertising. However, on the very week that native advertising is scheduled to begin in The Times, this episode does give one pause about keeping the lines between editorial content and advertising perfectly clear and well-defined.

In the end, nothing terrible happened here. But it’s a moment that, at the very least, ought to cause some internal discussion at The Times and the establishing of clear rules and practices.